A covering construction for packing disjoint copies of the Hoffman‐Singleton graph into K50

In this note we show how coverings induced by voltage assignments can be used to produce packings of disjoint copies of the Hoffman‐Singleton graph into K₅₀. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Combin Designs 11: 408–412, 2003; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/jcd.10049     

Total synthesis of (3S,4S,2′S)- and (3R,4R,2′S)-viridiofungin A triester

The total synthesis of an alkylcitrate secondary metabolite from the fungi Trichoderma viride is described. An ester dienolate [2,3]-Wittig rearrangement and a S. Julia-Kocienski olefination served as key C/C-connecting transformations. The highly convergent synthesis consists of a longest linear sequence of 17 steps.     

Quantification of trace elements in human serum fractions by liquid chromatography and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry

On‐line coupling of LC and ICP‐MS has been used for fractionation and detection of species of Cu, Fe, I, Se and Zn in human serum. It has been shown that anion exchange chromatography provided better separation capability (both intra‐ and inter‐element) than size‐exclusion chromatography. The mobile phases for ion exchange chromatography consisted of Tris–HNO₃ buffer and ammonium salt (nitrate, acetate or formate). Formate was found to be the best mobile phase counter ion, enabling good chromatographic separation, and is acceptable for mass spectrometry too. The quantitative evaluation of element concentrations adhering to individual fractions was performed by the peak area normalization method. The repeatability of results ranged from 3 to 15% (depending on the element concentration level) and represented the main part of the result uncertainty. The accuracy of Cu and Zn fraction determinations was confirmed by comparison with the isotope dilution technique. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Aeroelastic flutter of a disk rotating in an unbounded acoustic medium

The linear aeroelastic stability of an unbaffled flexible disk rotating in an unbounded fluid is investigated by modeling the disk-fluid system as a rotating Kirchhoff plate coupled to the irrotational motions of a compressible inviscid fluid. A perturbed eigenvalue formulation is used to compute systematically the coupled system eigenvalues. Both a semi-analytical and a numerical method are employed to solve the fluid boundary value problem. The semi-analytical approach involves a perturbation series solution of the dual integral equations arising from the fluid boundary value problem. The numerical approach is a boundary element method based on the Hadamard finite part. Unlike previous works, it is found that a disk with zero material damping destabilizes immediately beyond its lowest critical speed. Upon the inclusion of small disk material damping, the flutter speeds become supercritical and increase with decreasing fluid density. The competing effects of radiation damping into the surrounding fluid and disk material damping control the onset of flutter at supercritical speed. The results are expected to be relevant for the design of rotating disk systems in data storage, turbomachinery and manufacturing applications.     

On quasi-conformally flat weakly Ricci symmetric manifolds

The object of the present paper is to study quasi-conformally flat weakly Ricci symmetric manifolds.      

Photonic crystal devices

We developed photochemically controlled photonic crystals which may be useful in novel recordable and erasable memories and/or display devices. These materials can operate in the UV, visible or near IR spectral regions. Information is recorded and erased by exciting the photonic crystal with ∼ 360 nm UV light or ∼ 480 nm visible light. The recorded information is read out by measuring the photonic crystal diffraction wavelength. The active element of the device is an azobenzene functionalized hydrogel which contains an embedded crystalline colloidal array. UV excitation forms cis-azobenzene while visible excitation forms trans-azobenzene. Larger dipole moment of the cis-form results in decrease of the free energy of mixing which causes the hydrogel to swell and to red-shift the photonic crystal diffraction with a 36 s time constant. We also observed fast ms and sub-ms transient dynamics associated with convection due to heating of the medium by UV excitation. Convective motion of the medium stretches the PCCA for about 6 μs within which the convection decays and the elastic restoring force of the PCCA brings back the stretched PCCA to its equilibrium state with 33 μs time constant. Paper presented at the 2nd International Conference on Ionic Devices, Anna University, Chennai, India, Nov. 28–30, 2003.